Vice
President Joe Biden is never without an opinion or
controversial one-liner, and this is also true when it comes to
his love of Corvettes. While delivering a commencement speech
to Yale graduates this past weekend, he managed to slip in his
view that Corvettes are better than Porsches.

“So here it goes —
let’s get a couple things straight right off the bat: Corvettes
are better than Porsches," Biden asserts. "They’re quicker and
they corner as well." Here, we know he is speaking from
personal experience, as he gushed about his 1967 Corvette
Stingray last year at the Detroit auto show.

Here at Business Insider, we're big fans of the Corvette:
we named the Stingray our 2014 Car of the Year. But we like
Porsches, too. So while Biden is totally wrong that Corvettes are
better than Porsches, he's not totally without a point.

Objectively, the core Porsche — the 911 — is pretty much the best
performance car there is. Porsche has been producing it for
decades and has steadily refined it. The basic idea has always
been that if you want a car you can drive around town and on the
highway, but take an offramp to the racetrack if the urge
strikes, your default option is the Porsche.

So the Corvette isn't better. It is, however, far more
exciting.

It hasn't always been this way. The Vette has developed a bit of
a backwoods reputation. It's an animal (although the latest
versions have decisively changed that impression). Porsches, by
contrast, are surgical instruments: precise. The Vette needs to
be tamed. The Porsche is already perfect.

That said, the Porsche is so good, so easy to just jump in a
drive like it was meant to be driven, that it can bore you (in
the same pleasing way that a well-made German chef's knife bores
you as it makes short work of a carrot). The Vette, meanwhile,
keeps you wide awake. It did for me, anyway, with its harrowing
access to velocity with that first tap of the accelerator.

The driving is
easy.Gotham Dream
Cars

I had seat time recently in both
a 911 and a
Stingray (obviously with the latter, given its BI Car of the
Year accolade). The 911 was flat-out a piece of cake to operate
(OK, it had all-wheel-drive). The Vette was not (But who would
want an all-wheel-drive Vette?).

Really, it makes sense that Biden would enthuse over the Vette, a
car that with its roaring V8 simply doesn't want to shut up,
while dissing Porsches, with their whispered mastery of speed and
handling.